THE CLEANERS Trailer

Enter a shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the internet rids itself of what it doesn‘t like. Viewers meet five “digital scavengers,” among thousands of people outsourced by Silicon Valley companies, whose job is to delete “inappropriate” web content. A typical cleaner must observe and rate thousands of often deeply disturbing images and videos every day, leading to lasting psychological impact on them. The film also introduces people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. Underneath the cleaners’ work lies profound questions, among them: what is the balancing point where social media is neither an unlegislated space nor a forum rife with censorship? The Cleaners struggles to come to terms with this new and disconcerting paradigm, charting the rise and fall of social media’s utopian ideology from a shared vision of a global village to a web of fake news and radicalization.